Innovation

​Tamper Evident Radon: The Beginning

Tamper evident radon testing has been around for a while........ but it wasn't any good. Several companies install movement and electrical sensors in the machines so you could tell if someone tried to move the machine outside to lower the radon results. A few companies even added cheap air quality sensors that were highly inaccurate and only took samples once an hour. They alluded to being able to detect open conditions but never explicitly stated it because they knew the equipment wasn't good enough. Nevertheless, we tested it for ourselves and none of our tampering showed up in the data.

Shortly after, we Googled tampering with radon and found quite a few forums created by sellers discussing how to lower radon results so they didn't have any "problems" from home buyers. We decided to test some of these methods and sure enough, they significantly lowered indoor radon levels.

Starting from the ground up we built the hardware and software so we could find a way to detect every form of tampering we knew of. After a lot of time and effort we finally did it. The detection system uses six different scientific grade sensors that detect movement, changes in the indoor air, changes in outdoor air, introduction of outdoor air, open doors and windows, movement of the machine and anything being placed around or near the machine.

​After gathering thousands of samples under different conditions we found the only way to accurately detect tampering was to take close to 1,000,000 data points per test. Due to the size of the data set and complexity of interactions we had to build the first ever machine learning algorithm designed specifically for open and closed building conditions. It was the only way to make sense of it all.

The algorithm performs close to 10,000,000,000 calculations per test, extracts the important statistics and compares them to every previous test. If there are inconsistencies or abnormalities in the data the software will find them and let us know. The beauty of this system is that it learns from every test we do and updates its core equations so it can make better decisions in the future.

We know most businesses would charge a lot more than the market value if they invested as much as we did into research and development. But, money wasn't the driver. We started this to help people, not find a way to take more from them.